Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Following up on my last post's focus on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's newly enriched catalogue database, I thought of doing the same for the British Pathé archives. A couple of video segments stick out of the lot, the most interesting one being of the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Québec with a reenactment by the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1959.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Of interest: last year's quick overview of the history of the public holiday which in Canada has been variously known as Victoria Day, Journée nationale des Patriotes, or -- and here is the New France connection -- Fête de Dollard. It occurs on the last Monday before May 25th, and this year falls on the 19th.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Not the type of doofuses who go looking for eighteenth-century ghosts in Fort William Henry, Lake George, New York... actually a so-so replica of the original fort, built some distance from the original site in the 1950s. SyFy Channel's series "Ghost Hunters" nevertheless decided to devote an episode to it. A week ago, the fort hosted Para History Con 2. Spooky? Come on, folks!

Thursday, May 1, 2014

That's right, folks. The Globe and Mailreports on John Mark Tillmann's theft of some seven thousand artefacts and documents from museums, libraries, archives and shops. His Russian girlfriend served as accomplice. Among their most cherished moments:

The pair also stole a letter written in 1758 by General James Wolfe, the victor at the Plains of Abraham, from the Dalhousie University archives. Mr. Tillmann explains that he was able to copy a set of keys that opened a vault in the university’s library. He and Katya hid in the women’s bathroom until the night security guard left and used the keys to get into the vault, which was jammed with documents. After two hours of searching, around 3 a.m., they hit “pay dirt.”

“I said, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, if this is real’ – and it looked all real, [it] was the George Washington letter, worth probably half a million to a million dollars in itself. … And I thought, ‘Oh wow.’”

Rooting around further, they found the Wolfe letter.

“We became so exuberant over this – because it was pretty euphoric being in there and knowing at that point that you have millions of dollars worth of documents on the black market – that we ended up having sex right in the middle of all these papers and stuff strewn around,” he recalls. He still had the Washington and Wolfe letters, which he stole in 1998, when he was arrested last year.

I have to wonder. Are the good folks at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library ready for the euphoric hanky-panky that their recent acquisition will elicit? If a single Wolfe letter can have this effect, I dare not imagine what 233 of them will do.